Thomas Parker
Litr 5355: American Romanticism
Dr. White
09/302003

Midterm

The Conflict Between the Spiritual and Intellectual Ideals of America and Its Materialistic Nature in Pre-Romantic and Romantic Texts

            For this assignment I will be looking at some of the Pre-Romantic and Romantic texts we have covered thus far in class in light of objective two, bullet five, in the course syllabus:

Cultural Issues:  America as Romanticism, and vice versa[,] American Romanticism exposes competing or complementary dimensions of the American identity:  is America a cultural base for sensory and material gratification or moral, spiritual or idealistic mission? 

            The foundation of America lies in its conflicted persona.   Is it an intellectual and spiritual cultural experiment, or is it more simply a capitalistic one?  Columbus sees America for the first time through ravenous eyes and though the language of his letters elevate his discovery to a spiritual archetype by drawing parallels between the new continent and the biblical Eden and the promised land of the Hebrews; it also has a materialistic bent:

In it are marvelous pine groves, and there are very large tracts of cultivatable [sic] lands, and there is honey, and there are birds of many kinds and fruits in great diversity.  In the interior are mines of metals, and the population is without number"  (27).

            The tone of the Puritan texts display no small amount of concern for religion or God, but it also acknowledges conflict with the material.  In her poem "Upon the Burning of Our House" Anne Bradstreet struggles to hold to her  highest spiritual ideals, and not succumb to her instincts towards the material world.

                         . . .here stood that trunk, and there that chest

                        there lay that store I counted best

                        my pleasant thing in ashes lie,

                        and them behold no more shall I...

                        In silence ever shall thou lie,

                        Adieu, Adieu all's vanity.

                        then straight I gin my heart to chide,

                        and did thy wealth on earth abide?

                        (127)

In Bradstreet's poem the struggle between the material and the spiritual becomes extremely personal as it is for the authors of The Cherokee Memorials in which they protest the forced migration of the Cherokee Nation.  This banishment of the Cherokee  from their native land is in conflict with the principles which were used in the construction of our governing bodies.

            This conflict between idealism and materialism is also found in the the forced migration of the Cherokee Nation, principles which were used in the construction of our governing bodies.  This one incident serves as a good example of the many times where man's "inalienable rights" have been overlooked due in no small part to certain financial considerations.  That one of the founding principles of America is that all men are created equal must  seem contradictory in practice to the many individuals who have been enslaved or oppressed in this nation.

            The struggle between the spiritual and intellectual ideal versus materialism is portrayed in full Romantic proportions, and to a degree is personified in James Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth century novel,  The Deerslayer.  Anna Marie Le Blanc, in her 2000 essay for this class, also suggest the use of personification in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans:

Another locale of the sublime in Cooper's tale, is in the construction of the characters themselves.  Beyond even the prototypical romantic protagonist, certain characters . . .are sublime in that that they represent a convergence of polar substances.  (Le Blanc 3) 

            In Deerslayer, Cooper takes us back to a lost period in American history when virgin forest still stood in profusion.  He presents us with three characters; Hurry Harry, Thomas Hutter and Natty Bumppo, also known as Deerslayer.  One of the central aspects of Deerslayer's divergence from Hutter or Hurry is his take on material wealth and its importance.  Both of the other two men are more than willing to "go against their gifts", as Natty so often puts it, for material gain.

            Natty Bumppo is in stark contrast to Hutter and Hurry, who are lead by greed into immorality.  It is innate in Deerslayer's character to pursue a lifestyle of subsistence, which is portrayed as far superior to that of Hutter and Hurry, civilized society (represented by the much discussed "garrisons") or either tribe of Natives.  Deerslaver is imagined to be supremely in touch with the natural world, and he uses it as his moral compass and guide or gospel.  Hutter and Hurry are characterized by a more heedless consumption.  This is well illustrated by the following passage in which Hutter reveals the motivation for the raid that is attempted on the Huron hunting party of mixed sex and Deerslayer's response to his reasoning: 

'If there's women, there's children; and big and little scalps; the colony pays for all alike.'  'More shame to it, that it should be so' interrupted Deerslayer; 'more shame to it that it don't' understand its gifts, and pay greater attention to the will of God'. (Cooper 77)

It also seems that in this passage Cooper is sharpening the effect  of the fundamental contrast between his characters with the usage of the word "pay" in both Hutter and Deeralsyer's speeches.  Hutter refers to material gain and Deerslayer to homage given to a higher spiritual power.  Hutter and Hurry's willingness to raid the Indian hunting party in order to obtain the highly valued scalps demonstrates their mercenary quality.  This folly creates the central tension of the novel along with, of course, the relationship between Deerslayer and Judith;  and puts all the heroic seeming woodsman at a disadvantage when it ends with Hurry and Hutter being held captive by the Indians.  Much of the same contrasts can be found in The Pioneers, where we meet Deerslayer, now known as Leahtherstocking, later in life.

            In The Pioneers Cooper shows us a very different New England than the one glimpsed at in Deerslayer, where "ploughs [are] in motion wherever those useful implements [can] be used, and smokes of the sugar-camps [are] no longer seen issuing from the summits of the woods of maple"(463).  On the particular day in which the chapter opens, the inhabitants are assembled with every type of firearm they can muster.  Even a military cannon normally reserved for ceremonial duties is commandeered.  All for the brutal and wasteful purpose of assaulting large flocks of migrating pigeons.  After much firing into the flocks, which were "dart[ing] along the valley as if the whole creation of feathered tribe were pouring through that one pass" the dead and dying "lay scattered over the fields in such profusion, as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims" (465).  This killing and waste are an affront to the old frontiersman and he muses in his characteristic way;

This comes of settling a country. . . here I have known the pigeons to fly for forty long years, and till you made your clearings there was nobody to scare or hurt them.  I loved to see them come into the woods, for they were company to a body; hurting nothing; being as they was, as harmless as a garter-snake.  But now it gives me sore thoughts when I hear the frightly things whizzing through the air, it's wicked to be shooting into flocks in this wastey manner; and none do it, who know how to knock over a single bird.  If a body has a craving for pigeon's flesh, why! It's made the same as all other creaters for mans eating, but not to kill twenty and eat one. (466)

Leatherstocking  represents the spiritual ideals as being paramount and displays his attitude towards the wasteful consumption endemic of the  emerging society.